A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travellers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.

The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.